OpenRaiser/Intern-Atlas huggingface dataset:
Measuring Dimensions of Self-Presentation in Twitter Bios and their Links to Misinformation Sharing
Venue: arXiv cs.CL 2024
Year: 2024

Social media platforms provide users with a profile description field, commonly known as a ``bio," where they can present themselves to the world. A growing literature shows that text in these bios can improve our understanding of online self-presentation and behavior, but existing work relies exclusively on keyword-based approaches to do so. We here propose and evaluate a suite of \hl{simple, effective, and theoretically motivated} approaches to embed bios in spaces that capture salient dimensions of social meaning, such as age and partisanship. We \hl{evaluate our methods on four tasks, showing that the strongest one out-performs several practical baselines.} We then show the utility of our method in helping understand associations between self-presentation and the sharing of URLs from low-quality news sites on Twitter\hl{, with a particular focus on explore the interactions between age and partisanship, and exploring the effects of self-presentations of religiosity}. Our work provides new tools to help computational social scientists make use of information in bios, and provides new insights into how misinformation sharing may be perceived on Twitter.
Scale-Adaptive Balancing of Exploration and Exploitation in Classical Planning
Venue: arXiv cs.AI 2024
Year: 2024

Balancing exploration and exploitation has been an important problem in both game tree search and automated planning. However, while the problem has been extensively analyzed within the Multi-Armed Bandit (MAB) literature, the planning community has had limited success when attempting to apply those results. We show that a more detailed theoretical understanding of MAB literature helps improve existing planning algorithms that are based on Monte Carlo Tree Search (MCTS) / Trial Based Heuristic Tree Search (THTS). In particular, THTS uses UCB1 MAB algorithms in an ad hoc manner, as UCB1's theoretical requirement of fixed bounded support reward distributions is not satisfied within heuristic search for classical planning. The core issue lies in UCB1's lack of adaptations to the different scales of the rewards. We propose GreedyUCT-Normal, a MCTS/THTS algorithm with UCB1-Normal bandit for agile classical planning, which handles distributions with different scales by taking the reward variance into consideration, and resulted in an improved algorithmic performance (more plans found with less node expansions) that outperforms Greedy Best First Search and existing MCTS/THTS-based algorithms (GreedyUCT,GreedyUCT*).
HICO-DET-SG and V-COCO-SG: New Data Splits for Evaluating the Systematic Generalization Performance of Human-Object Interaction Detection Models
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2024
Year: 2024

Human-Object Interaction (HOI) detection is a task to localize humans and objects in an image and predict the interactions in human-object pairs. In real-world scenarios, HOI detection models need systematic generalization, i.e., generalization to novel combinations of objects and interactions, because the train data are expected to cover a limited portion of all possible combinations. To evaluate the systematic generalization performance of HOI detection models, we created two new sets of HOI detection data splits named HICO-DET-SG and V-COCO-SG based on the HICO-DET and V-COCO datasets, respectively. When evaluated on the new data splits, HOI detection models with various characteristics performed much more poorly than when evaluated on the original splits. This shows that systematic generalization is a challenging goal in HOI detection. By analyzing the evaluation results, we also gain insights for improving the systematic generalization performance and identify four possible future research directions. We hope that our new data splits and presented analysis will encourage further research on systematic generalization in HOI detection.
Real-Time Flying Object Detection with YOLOv8
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2024
Year: 2024

This paper presents a generalized model for real-time detection of flying objects that can be used for transfer learning and further research, as well as a refined model that achieves state-of-the-art results for flying object detection. We achieve this by training our first (generalized) model on a data set containing 40 different classes of flying objects, forcing the model to extract abstract feature representations. We then perform transfer learning with these learned parameters on a data set more representative of real world environments (i.e. higher frequency of occlusion, very small spatial sizes, rotations, etc.) to generate our refined model. Object detection of flying objects remains challenging due to large variances of object spatial sizes/aspect ratios, rate of speed, occlusion, and clustered backgrounds. To address some of the presented challenges while simultaneously maximizing performance, we utilize the current state-of-the-art single-shot detector, YOLOv8, in an attempt to find the best trade-off between inference speed and mean average precision (mAP). While YOLOv8 is being regarded as the new state-of-the-art, an official paper has not been released as of yet. Thus, we provide an in-depth explanation of the new architecture and functionality that YOLOv8 has adapted. Our final generalized model achieves a mAP50 of 79.2%, mAP50-95 of 68.5%, and an average inference speed of 50 frames per second (fps) on 1080p videos. Our final refined model maintains this inference speed and achieves an improved mAP50 of 99.1% and mAP50-95 of 83.5%
Reconstruction Error-based Anomaly Detection with Few Outlying Examples
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2024
Year: 2024

Reconstruction error-based neural architectures constitute a classical deep learning approach to anomaly detection which has shown great performances. It consists in training an Autoencoder to reconstruct a set of examples deemed to represent the normality and then to point out as anomalies those data that show a sufficiently large reconstruction error. Unfortunately, these architectures often become able to well reconstruct also the anomalies in the data. This phenomenon is more evident when there are anomalies in the training set. In particular when these anomalies are labeled, a setting called semi-supervised, the best way to train Autoencoders is to ignore anomalies and minimize the reconstruction error on normal data. The goal of this work is to investigate approaches to allow reconstruction error-based architectures to instruct the model to put known anomalies outside of the domain description of the normal data. Specifically, our strategy exploits a limited number of anomalous examples to increase the contrast between the reconstruction error associated with normal examples and those associated with both known and unknown anomalies, thus enhancing anomaly detection performances. The experiments show that this new procedure achieves better performances than the standard Autoencoder approach and the main deep learning techniques for semi-supervised anomaly detection.
A benchmark for computational analysis of animal behavior, using animal-borne tags
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2024
Year: 2024

Animal-borne sensors (`bio-loggers') can record a suite of kinematic and environmental data, which are used to elucidate animal ecophysiology and improve conservation efforts. Machine learning techniques are used for interpreting the large amounts of data recorded by bio-loggers, but there exists no common framework for comparing the different machine learning techniques in this domain. This makes it difficult to, for example, identify patterns in what works well for machine learning-based analysis of bio-logger data. It also makes it difficult to evaluate the effectiveness of novel methods developed by the machine learning community. To address this, we present the Bio-logger Ethogram Benchmark (BEBE), a collection of datasets with behavioral annotations, as well as a modeling task and evaluation metrics. BEBE is to date the largest, most taxonomically diverse, publicly available benchmark of this type. Using BEBE, we compare the performance of deep and classical machine learning methods for identifying animal behaviors based on bio-logger data. As an example usage of BEBE, we test an approach based on self-supervised learning. To apply this approach to animal behavior classification, we adapt a deep neural network pre-trained with 700,000 hours of data collected from human wrist-worn accelerometers. We find that deep neural networks out-perform the classical machine learning methods we tested across all nine datasets in BEBE. We additionally find that the approach based on self-supervised learning out-performs the alternatives we tested, especially in settings when there is a low amount of training data available. In light of this, we are able to make concrete suggestions for designing studies that rely on machine learning to infer behavior from bio-logger data. Datasets and code are available at https://github.com/earthspecies/BEBE.
Multi-spectral Class Center Network for Face Manipulation Detection and Localization
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2024
Year: 2024

As deepfake content proliferates online, advancing face manipulation forensics has become crucial. To combat this emerging threat, previous methods mainly focus on studying how to distinguish authentic and manipulated face images. Although impressive, image-level classification lacks explainability and is limited to specific application scenarios, spurring recent research on pixel-level prediction for face manipulation forensics. However, existing forgery localization methods suffer from exploring frequency-based forgery traces in the localization network. In this paper, we observe that multi-frequency spectrum information is effective for identifying tampered regions. To this end, a novel Multi-Spectral Class Center Network (MSCCNet) is proposed for face manipulation detection and localization. Specifically, we design a Multi-Spectral Class Center (MSCC) module to learn more generalizable and multi-frequency features. Based on the features of different frequency bands, the MSCC module collects multi-spectral class centers and computes pixel-to-class relations. Applying multi-spectral class-level representations suppresses the semantic information of the visual concepts which is insensitive to manipulated regions of forgery images. Furthermore, we propose a Multi-level Features Aggregation (MFA) module to employ more low-level forgery artifacts and structural textures. Meanwhile, we conduct a comprehensive localization benchmark based on pixel-level FF++ and Dolos datasets. Experimental results quantitatively and qualitatively demonstrate the effectiveness and superiority of the proposed MSCCNet. We expect this work to inspire more studies on pixel-level face manipulation localization. The codes are available (https://github.com/miaoct/MSCCNet).
Spatial-Frequency Discriminability for Revealing Adversarial Perturbations
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2024
Year: 2024

The vulnerability of deep neural networks to adversarial perturbations has been widely perceived in the computer vision community. From a security perspective, it poses a critical risk for modern vision systems, e.g., the popular Deep Learning as a Service (DLaaS) frameworks. For protecting deep models while not modifying them, current algorithms typically detect adversarial patterns through discriminative decomposition for natural and adversarial data. However, these decompositions are either biased towards frequency resolution or spatial resolution, thus failing to capture adversarial patterns comprehensively. Also, when the detector relies on few fixed features, it is practical for an adversary to fool the model while evading the detector (i.e., defense-aware attack). Motivated by such facts, we propose a discriminative detector relying on a spatial-frequency Krawtchouk decomposition. It expands the above works from two aspects: 1) the introduced Krawtchouk basis provides better spatial-frequency discriminability, capturing the differences between natural and adversarial data comprehensively in both spatial and frequency distributions, w.r.t. the common trigonometric or wavelet basis; 2) the extensive features formed by the Krawtchouk decomposition allows for adaptive feature selection and secrecy mechanism, significantly increasing the difficulty of the defense-aware attack, w.r.t. the detector with few fixed features. Theoretical and numerical analyses demonstrate the uniqueness and usefulness of our detector, exhibiting competitive scores on several deep models and image sets against a variety of adversarial attacks.
Swap Attention in Spatiotemporal Diffusions for Text-to-Video Generation
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2024
Year: 2024

With the explosive popularity of AI-generated content (AIGC), video generation has recently received a lot of attention. Generating videos guided by text instructions poses significant challenges, such as modeling the complex relationship between space and time, and the lack of large-scale text-video paired data. Existing text-video datasets suffer from limitations in both content quality and scale, or they are not open-source, rendering them inaccessible for study and use. For model design, previous approaches extend pretrained text-to-image generation models by adding temporal 1D convolution/attention modules for video generation. However, these approaches overlook the importance of jointly modeling space and time, inevitably leading to temporal distortions and misalignment between texts and videos. In this paper, we propose a novel approach that strengthens the interaction between spatial and temporal perceptions. In particular, we utilize a swapped cross-attention mechanism in 3D windows that alternates the "query" role between spatial and temporal blocks, enabling mutual reinforcement for each other. Moreover, to fully unlock model capabilities for high-quality video generation and promote the development of the field, we curate a large-scale and open-source video dataset called HD-VG-130M. This dataset comprises 130 million text-video pairs from the open-domain, ensuring high-definition, widescreen and watermark-free characters. A smaller-scale yet more meticulously cleaned subset further enhances the data quality, aiding models in achieving superior performance. Experimental quantitative and qualitative results demonstrate the superiority of our approach in terms of per-frame quality, temporal correlation, and text-video alignment, with clear margins.
Graphical vs. Deep Generative Models: Measuring the Impact of Differentially Private Mechanisms and Budgets on Utility
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2024
Year: 2024

Generative models trained with Differential Privacy (DP) can produce synthetic data while reducing privacy risks. However, navigating their privacy-utility tradeoffs makes finding the best models for specific settings/tasks challenging. This paper bridges this gap by profiling how DP generative models for tabular data distribute privacy budgets across rows and columns, which is one of the primary sources of utility degradation. We compare graphical and deep generative models, focusing on the key factors contributing to how privacy budgets are spent, i.e., underlying modeling techniques, DP mechanisms, and data dimensionality. Through our measurement study, we shed light on the characteristics that make different models suitable for various settings and tasks. For instance, we find that graphical models distribute privacy budgets horizontally and thus cannot handle relatively wide datasets for a fixed training time; also, the performance on the task they were optimized for monotonically increases with more data but could also overfit. Deep generative models spend their budgets per iteration, so their behavior is less predictable with varying dataset dimensions, but are more flexible as they could perform better if trained on more features. Moreover, low levels of privacy ($ε\geq100$) could help some models generalize, achieving better results than without applying DP. We believe our work will aid the deployment of DP synthetic data techniques by navigating through the best candidate models vis-a-vis the dataset features, desired privacy levels, and downstream tasks.
Overcoming Topology Agnosticism: Enhancing Skeleton-Based Action Recognition through Redefined Skeletal Topology Awareness
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2024
Year: 2024

Graph Convolutional Networks (GCNs) have long defined the state-of-the-art in skeleton-based action recognition, leveraging their ability to unravel the complex dynamics of human joint topology through the graph's adjacency matrix. However, an inherent flaw has come to light in these cutting-edge models: they tend to optimize the adjacency matrix jointly with the model weights. This process, while seemingly efficient, causes a gradual decay of bone connectivity data, culminating in a model indifferent to the very topology it sought to map. As a remedy, we propose a threefold strategy: (1) We forge an innovative pathway that encodes bone connectivity by harnessing the power of graph distances. This approach preserves the vital topological nuances often lost in conventional GCNs. (2) We highlight an oft-overlooked feature - the temporal mean of a skeletal sequence, which, despite its modest guise, carries highly action-specific information. (3) Our investigation revealed strong variations in joint-to-joint relationships across different actions. This finding exposes the limitations of a single adjacency matrix in capturing the variations of relational configurations emblematic of human movement, which we remedy by proposing an efficient refinement to Graph Convolutions (GC) - the BlockGC. This evolution slashes parameters by a substantial margin (above 40%), while elevating performance beyond original GCNs. Our full model, the BlockGCN, establishes new standards in skeleton-based action recognition for small model sizes. Its high accuracy, notably on the large-scale NTU RGB+D 120 dataset, stand as compelling proof of the efficacy of BlockGCN.
CM-MaskSD: Cross-Modality Masked Self-Distillation for Referring Image Segmentation
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2024
Year: 2024

Referring image segmentation (RIS) is a fundamental vision-language task that intends to segment a desired object from an image based on a given natural language expression. Due to the essentially distinct data properties between image and text, most of existing methods either introduce complex designs towards fine-grained vision-language alignment or lack required dense alignment, resulting in scalability issues or mis-segmentation problems such as over- or under-segmentation. To achieve effective and efficient fine-grained feature alignment in the RIS task, we explore the potential of masked multimodal modeling coupled with self-distillation and propose a novel cross-modality masked self-distillation framework named CM-MaskSD, in which our method inherits the transferred knowledge of image-text semantic alignment from CLIP model to realize fine-grained patch-word feature alignment for better segmentation accuracy. Moreover, our CM-MaskSD framework can considerably boost model performance in a nearly parameter-free manner, since it shares weights between the main segmentation branch and the introduced masked self-distillation branches, and solely introduces negligible parameters for coordinating the multimodal features. Comprehensive experiments on three benchmark datasets (i.e. RefCOCO, RefCOCO+, G-Ref) for the RIS task convincingly demonstrate the superiority of our proposed framework over previous state-of-the-art methods.
InstructIE: A Bilingual Instruction-based Information Extraction Dataset
Venue: arXiv cs.CL 2024
Year: 2024

Large language models can perform well on general natural language tasks, but their effectiveness is still suboptimal for information extraction (IE). Recent works indicate that the main reason lies in the lack of extensive data on IE instructions. Note that the existing datasets on IE instructions not only have limited coverage but also involve high construction costs. To address this issue, we introduce InstructIE, a bilingual instruction-based IE dataset, which covers 12 diverse domains. We propose KG2Instruction, a framework specifically for the automatic generation of such datasets. Additionally, we manually annotate the test set. Experimental results demonstrate that large language models trained with InstructIE can not only obtain better IE capabilities but also enhance zero-shot performance compared with baselines.
Semantic Filtering and Source Coding in Distributed Wireless Monitoring Systems
Venue: arXiv cs.IT 2024
Year: 2024

The problem of goal-oriented semantic filtering and timely source coding in multiuser communication systems is considered here. We study a distributed monitoring system in which multiple information sources, each observing a physical process, provide status update packets to multiple monitors having heterogeneous goals. Two semantic filtering schemes are first proposed as a means to admit or drop arrival packets based on their goal-dependent importance, which is a function of the intrinsic and extrinsic attributes of information and the probability of occurrence of each realization. Admitted packets at each sensor are then encoded and transmitted over block-fading wireless channels so that served monitors can timely fulfill their goals. A truncated error control scheme is derived, which allows transmitters to drop or retransmit undelivered packets based on their significance. Then, we formulate the timely source encoding optimization problem and analytically derive the optimal codeword lengths assigned to the admitted packets which maximize a weighted sum of semantic utility functions for all pairs of communicating sensors and monitors. Our analytical and numerical results provide the optimal design parameters for different arrival rates and highlight the improvement in timely status update delivery using the proposed semantic filtering, source coding, and error control schemes.
ToolkenGPT: Augmenting Frozen Language Models with Massive Tools via Tool Embeddings
Venue: arXiv cs.CL 2024
Year: 2024

Augmenting large language models (LLMs) with external tools has emerged as a promising approach to solving complex problems. However, traditional methods, which finetune LLMs with tool demonstration data, can be both costly and restricted to a predefined set of tools. Recent in-context learning paradigm alleviates these issues, but the limited context length only allows for a few shots of demonstrations, leading to suboptimal understandings of the tools. Moreover, when there are numerous tools to choose from, in-context learning could completely fail to work. In this paper, we propose an alternative approach, $\textbf{ToolkenGPT}$, which combines the benefits of both sides. Our approach represents each $\underline{tool}$ as a to$\underline{ken}$ ($\textit{toolken}$) and learns an embedding for it, enabling tool calls in the same way as generating a regular word token. Once a toolken is triggered, the LLM is prompted to complete arguments for the tool to execute. ToolkenGPT offers the flexibility to plug in an arbitrary number of tools by expanding the set of toolkens on the fly. In addition, it improves tool use by allowing extensive demonstration data for learning the toolken embeddings. In diverse domains, including numerical reasoning, knowledge-based question answering, and embodied plan generation, our approach effectively augments LLMs with tools and substantially outperforms various latest baselines. ToolkenGPT demonstrates the promising ability to use relevant tools from a large tool set in complex scenarios.